“We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing” (2 Thessalonians 1:3).

Springtime is so inspiring.  New life is breaking the soil and everything grows so fast. The vibrancy of young life with its fresh bright colors assault us on every side and it is glorious.  Plants thrive with the Sun’s energy.  They soak up water, drink in nutrients and soon will bear fresh fruit.

The healthy Christian lives in perpetual springtime.  The ‘Son’ rises upon them daily. They are planted by the river of God’s delights and regularly drink in the vital, life-giving power of the Word of God.

A healthy plant is known by the sweet fruit that it produces.  What does the healthy Christian produce?  Paul, in 2 Thessalonians 1:3, mentions two evident fruits of the mature Christian life – growing faith and increasing love.  Faith is how we relate to God and love is how we relate to others. 

Faith is taking God’s Word as both true and wise and then acting on it in fruit-bearing hope. God speaks, we listen and heed his words.  The maturing Christian grows in his ability to apply the life-giving Word of God to every moment, every relationship, every issue of his life. And that growth is evident. Paul can see it and praise it.

But, how is it evident? Increasing love for one another reveals it. Knowing God and applying His Word makes us great lovers of all mankind.  At least it should.  Here, Paul talks about the increasing love that Christians have for one another. Because we know God, we also know ourselves. The fall, and sin’s deception, are not merely abstract theological concepts, but a daily experienced reality. A sad reality that God is healing in us through grace. Because of this healing we can be brutally honest with ourselves, warts and all, and patiently gracious towards our fellow strugglers. If we learn God’s love through the gospel, it is easy (easier?) to patiently love others.

Just as the Hospital is the place where Doctors practice medicine, the church fellowship is where we practice love. This mutual love is the low-hanging fruit in the congregation that all produce and we all enjoy.  God’s grace working in us nurtures the faith and love that produce hope of new life. Springtime is so encouraging.

“Those who live by God’s forgiveness must imitate it; one whose only hope is that God will not hold his faults against him forfeits his right to hold others’ faults against them.” – J.I. Packer

I need God’s grace.  I am still weak, misguided, headstrong and unbelieving.  I need His wisdom, patience, and mercy applied to me daily.  I have always conceived of the pastoral ministry as one hungry beggar showing other hungry beggars where to find bread.  I depend on the free grace that I preach to you. Thomas Manton wrote, “there is none so tender to others as they which have received mercy themselves; that know how gently God hath dealt with them.” Grace must be needed, received, and enjoyed, before it can be effectively proclaimed.

I think this is one reason why men are called to preach and not angels.  The faithful angels do not need the same grace that I do.  One of the qualifications for preaching Christ is being humbled and exalted by that sweet grace of the gospel. We must taste that sustaining and transforming grace before we can joyfully and powerfully proclaim it to others. I can at times grow weary at the weakness and ignorance of God’s sheep.  Until I remember my own.  Depression grows when I see the hard-heartedness of God’s children; until I remember my own.  You get the picture.  We all need the same thing; the humility to receive and remain dependent on the sure grace of God.

We must shepherd others as Christ has shepherded us. Paul speaks of his pastoral ministry in this way, “but we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children” (1 Thessalonians 2:7).  Early on in my ministry I summarized this conviction in a way that I would remember. “Be as patient, gracious, and gentle with others as Christ was with you.” That thought has served me well as I walk among the weak, the wounded, and the weary. I am the hungry beggar that has found the bread!  Join me and let us celebrate the grace of God together!  Pray that we would be a gentle, gracious presence in the midst of God’s flock at Westminster.

The Longing Finally Fulfilled

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11–13, ESV)

Out of the abundance of His own joy, beauty, and glory God has created all things. His creatures/creation all reflect, and in some sense, participate, in His glory. God has hidden himself in all the joy and beauty that He has made.  We can see Him, sense and experience Him in all that is fair.  

Mankind was made in the image of God as the crowning achievement of all that He had made. God created us with sensors to know Him and to recognize and enjoy all the expressions of his glory, even those glimpses found in the created order.  He has placed eternity in our hearts!  We long for God as we see the various manifestations of his glory all around us.

Yet, we are fallen creatures, partially blinded, and were unceremoniously escorted out of the Garden of God’s delights.  Now, we cannot find out what God has done.  We long for Him, for beauty, for glory; we can taste it and even glimpse it from a distance but it never fully satisfies.  We long for home but we do not know the way. We have lost the map.

CS Lewis calls this longing, Sehnsucht. This German word roughly modified means “the sense of deep, inconsolable longing, yearning, the feeling of intensely missing something when we don’t even know what it is” (Jennifer Neyhart).  From Till we Have Faces, “it almost hurt me … like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home … to find the place where all the beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born. The longing for home.”

We all have this longing for home, for joy, for satisfaction, for fulfillment.  We try to slake this hunger with other created things; fame, wealth, physical pleasure, etc. but they never satisfy.

CS Lewis in speaking of meaning and joy of his short marriage wrote, “Are no all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who had some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year after year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.  But if it should really become manifest- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.””

Later, speaking of this longing for home, Lewis wrote, “About death I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for a patria. It is the bright frontispiece which whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”

Only God himself, his essential glory, can satisfy this longing. The glory that God has placed in the created order are hints, dim reflections, or better, foretastes of the satisfaction that we can only find in God. “Our hearts are restless, until they can rest in you.” (Augustine)

So, the preacher concludes, it is good for us to enjoy the foretastes, the hints of that glory, but not to rest in them short of the God who gave them. “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.” 

So, enjoy the gifts of God that he has placed in the created order but follow the gifts to the great Giver, and find your rest in Him.  “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us is we trust to them; it was not in them, in only came through them, and what came through them was longing… For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” CS Lewis. “One day, soon, we will be home. “What are hearts seek and hunger after is the overwhelming joy of homecoming and reunion with a Beloved.” (Terry Lindval)

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (CS Lewis).  Death is not the end. It is The End! The goal, the purpose, the place where our longing hearts will be satisfied.  It is life, finally. It is home.The